A 160th birthday is an odd occasion to commemorate, I’ll confess. There are no longer any traditional gifts for the 160th. Unlike a sesquicentennial—the 150th—this milestone bears no well-worn Latin name. But they say after a certain age, every birthday is a triumph. So it is with The Atlantic, which officially turns 160 years old today.

Careful readers might notice that we’ve been celebrating this anniversary by degrees throughout the year. In February, we launched the Life Timeline, a tool that lets you view your lifetime as The Atlantic might see it, weighted against the backdrop of history. Jeffrey Goldberg, our editor in chief, noted the date of the magazine’s conception back in May, and marked its first publication in this month’s issue. We embarked on a search for our longest-running subscriber, and found William Allan Plummer, who began taking the magazine upon his return from World War II. Instead of revisiting the future of the American idea, as we did a decade ago, we asked our politics editor and resident historian Yoni Appelbaum to investigate whether that idea has run its course.

Today, however, is the anniversary itself. One hundred and sixty years ago tomorrow, our very first issue was given a middling review by The New York Times. “Though the talent of the writers in the Atlantic is indisputable,” the anonymous reviewer concluded, "there is a lack of freshness in the topics discussed.” Yet readers were encouraged to reserve judgment: "A periodical, like a horse or a steamer, must have sufficient time allowed it to show its strength.”

Now that the steamer itself has faded into antiquity, one must allow that sufficient time has passed to judge The Atlantic’s strength. But the Times’ reviewer, sniffing through our pages for freshness, would perhaps have been unable to discern the quality that marked the best of those pages: They would grow ever richer with age. This is why we revisit the archive, because the secrets it whispers to us year after year only improve.

Starting today, and stretching well into 2018, we’ll be highlighting a story from each successive year of our existence—one every weekday, 160 stories in all. Our first story, from the December 1857 issue, is a broadside against slavery by the ardent abolitionist Edmund Quincy, titled “Where Will It End?”

Quincy understood slavery as its victims did, not merely as a grotesque evil visited by one set of human beings upon another, but as a rot in the very foundation of America, and a sabotage of its founding ideals. "The entire history of the United States is but the record of the evidence of this fact,” Quincy wrote. "What event in our annals is there that Slavery has not set her brand upon it to mark it as her own? In the very moment of the nation's birth, like the evil fairy of the nursery tale, she was present to curse it with her fatal words.” As with all our best pieces, Quincy’s thoughts resound as loudly in our time as in his: "Oligarchies are nothing new in the history of the world,” he observed. "The government of the many by the few is the rule, and not the exception, in the politics of the times that have been and of those that now are."

After a year of uncertainty and unhappiness, the president is reportedly feeling more comfortable—but has he really mastered the job?

It was a fun weekend for Donald Trump. Late on Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Andrew McCabe, the outgoing FBI deputy director whom Trump had long targeted, and the president spent the rest of the weekend taking victory laps: cheering McCabe’s departure, taking shots at his former boss and mentor James Comey, and renewing his barrage against Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump’s moods shift quickly, but over the last week or so, a different overarching feel has manifested itself, a meta-mood. Although he remains irritated by Mueller and any number of other things, Trump seems to be relishing the latest sound of chaos, “leaning into the maelstrom,” as McKay Coppins put it Friday. This is rooted, Maggie Haberman reports, in a growing confidence on the president’s part: “A dozen people close to Mr. Trump or the White House, including current and former aides and longtime friends, described him as newly emboldened to say what he really feels and to ignore the cautions of those around him.”

Invented centuries ago in France, the bidet has never taken off in the States. That might be changing.

“It’s been completely Americanized!” my host declares proudly. “The bidet is gone!” In my time as a travel editor, this scenario has become common when touring improvements to hotels and resorts around the world. My heart sinks when I hear it. To me, this doesn’t feel like progress, but prejudice.

Americans seem especially baffled by these basins. Even seasoned American travelers are unsure of their purpose: One globe-trotter asked me, “Why do the bathrooms in this hotel have both toilets and urinals?” And even if they understand the bidet’s function, Americans often fail to see its appeal. Attempts to popularize the bidet in the United States have failed before, but recent efforts continue—and perhaps they might even succeed in bringing this Old World device to new backsides.

How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues.

A new six-part Netflix documentary is a stunning dive into a utopian religious community in Oregon that descended into darkness.

To describe Wild Wild Country as jaw-dropping is to understate the number of times my mouth gaped while watching the series, a six-part Netflix documentary about a religious community in Oregon in the 1980s. It’s ostensibly the story of how a group led by the dynamic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh purchased 64,000 acres of land in central Oregon in a bid to build its own utopian city. But, as the series immediately reveals, the narrative becomes darker and stranger than you might ever imagine. It’s a tale that mines the weirdness of the counterculture in the ’70s and ’80s, the age-old conflict between rural Americans and free love–preaching cityfolk, and the emotional vacuum that compels people to interpret a bearded mystic as something akin to a god.